All's Well That Ends (29 page)

“And they told you?”

“I may have stretched the truth a little. I said I was trying to track him down. That I was handling some of the late Phoebe Ennis’s estate, and we’d discovered a problem he needed to attend to, that he’d said he was heading to the bank to arrange a mortgage, and I was hoping I could catch him there. It took three banks before I found him.”

“Why would they tell you that? Isn’t it private?”

“I didn’t ask for a single bit of information except whether he’d been there. Once I knew that he had been to one of them, once I knew there’d been an attempted crime, it wasn’t that hard to call in a favor to get some of the law on my side—”

“Somebody on the force?” Sasha asked. “Somebody you used to work with?”

He nodded. “All we wanted was to know what he was trying.

No big thing. Except, of course, to Dennis.”

“And Toy. She was trying to rob me! I can’t get over it—the two of them. And look where it got her!”

We were quiet for a moment. “Hey,” I said. “Let’s be really shallow and materialistic about this. There’s no mortgage. That means a nice chunk of change for you someday.”

“No thanks to him,” she grumbled.

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“Not much is thanks to him,” I said. “But there’s a further downside as far as I’m concerned. Toy’s death hurt him. It didn’t help anything.”

“And to you, that means he had nothing to do with it,”

Mackenzie said as he collected Sasha’s share of the dinner bill. We all stood and went over to the cashier.

“Doesn’t it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “There are unintended consequences, and it’s been my experience that criminals are seldom sharp enough to think them through. If they did any long-term planning, they wouldn’t be criminals. She was conspiring with him. Truth was, he may have changed his mind, figured she’d signed the papers and he didn’t need her anymore. Or afraid she’d somehow let slip what was going on.”

“So Merilee and Dennis are still on the list,” I said. “What do we do, flip a coin?”

“It would be nice to find a scrap of evidence first,” Mackenzie murmured as he signed the credit card slip and opened the door to what had turned into an icy and blustery December night.

“My God but it’s cold,” Sasha said. “What happened to global
warming
?”

“Did you walk here?” I asked her, and when she said she had, I offered to drive her home. “I’m parked around the corner.

Mackenzie’s dropping me off, taking the car to go back to the office for a few hours, but he could drop you off first. Or second.”

She stamped her feet and shook her head. “I’m on a health and fitness kick, and I’m sticking to it.”

“I won’t ask how pizza fits into that plan,” I said, “but I will ask how long you’ve been on it.”

She looked at her watch. “Since three minutes ago. I took a silent vow after eating that last piece of the pie. I need to burn off a few of those calories. No problem.” She pulled the fake-zebra-skin collar of her black coat up.

“Start tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe the windchill factor won’t be as bad. Or try running in place. Inside your condo.”

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She smiled. “Do you feel horrible about corrupting me? I had such fine intentions. But I’ll only agree if you’ll come hang with me while Mackenzie works. What do you say? Have a cup of decaf. I have some stuff I want to talk with you about, anyway.”

Stuff. Enough of crime, then. I knew what “stuff ” was for Sasha. She’d met somebody. Again. And she didn’t want to talk about him in front of Mackenzie, knowing he’d disapprove.

They’d long since ended their initial dislike of each other, but Sasha was aware of Mackenzie’s incomprehension and mild irritation about her talent at finding the worst possible men as romantic partners. It stymied me, too, because she was otherwise close to sane. But each one was “different,” and I braced myself for the particulars of her newest find.

I had no real urgency about going back to the empty loft.

Macavity could wait. He had food and water, and it was Mackenzie for whom he yearned in any case.

Of course there were papers to mark, but there always were.

“Deal,” I said.

She nodded and we walked toward the car, where I got into the tiny back rather than force her six-foot-tall body into the necessary contortions. “If you’re going to drag third parties into your car, and then be polite and accommodating, you should get yourself a four door and get rid of the Bug,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what. Once you’re an heiress with all that house money, you can buy us a bigger car.”

“I can see how it’s going to be,” she said. “People coming out of the woodwork to make claims. You know it isn’t really going to be all that much, don’t you? It’s not exactly a palace.”

And then, without anyone needing to say we needed a break from crime, we stopped talking about Phoebe, Toy, Dennis, and the house. Instead, we described our various days, weekend plans, how the people who’d been staying with Mackenzie’s aunt and uncle were moving out of Louisiana altogether, and a dissertation idea rolling around in Mackenzie’s head. “I’m intrigued by how high morals spin out of control into fanaticism and lawless-231

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ness,” he said. “Maybe it all comes from reading that book about Napoleon.”

We had to circle around because of one-way streets and to stop and start because of traffic, so the relatively short distance to Sasha’s condo required a convoluted route and an inordinate amount of time.

“Could have walked it more quickly,” I said.

“And burned off at least half a slice’s worth of body fat,”

Sasha said. “Not that I’m sorry you thwarted me.”

After Mackenzie had been quiet for several blocks, I leaned forward and tapped his shoulder. “Are you ready to tell us what it is?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“What’s on your mind? I saw that look you got at dinner, as if you mentally sidestepped into your own private space, and now, again. What’s it about?”

He chuckled softly, and to my relief skipped the “Maybe we’ve been married too long because you’re reading my mind”

riff. “Okay,” he said. “Where did you say Phoebe lived, Sasha?”

She squinted at him. “I know you too well to think you’ve forgotten, but here goes again: in New Jersey. Bordentown. She was born and bred in Jersey, though she did move around a little with all those marriages. Why?”

He took a deep breath. “Because there was, in fact, a king in Jersey. The king of Spain lived there.”

“Gee, you’d think one of the requirements for that job would be living in Spain.”

“The former king of Spain, then. Joseph Bonaparte. Napoleon’s big brother.”

“No,” I said. “That’s too—you’re serious?”

He nodded. “Nappy got Elba, Joe got Bordentown. I didn’t want to say it right out at dinner because I had to think about it for a while, because—”

“It changes everything.”

He nodded again. “It’s speculation, nothing more. Joseph GILLIAN ROBERTS

232

was going to be exiled, just like Napoleon, only he was going to be sent to Russia. He escaped to the States under a false name, carrying a suitcase full of jewels. But he also had around five million dollars worth of gold buried in Switzerland. Eventually, his manservant went back and retrieved it.”

“Huh,” Sasha said. “Five million dollars back then? That’d be—incredible now.”

“So would five million,” I said.

“Interesting how easily we can mention his stealing—it was stealing, right?—a fortune because it was long ago. And because he was a king in New Jersey.”

“He often wintered in Philadelphia.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous—and when I buy you a bigger car, the most important thing will be a decent heating system. It’s freezing in here.” Sasha smacked the dashboard.

“My point being that it doesn’t matter that much where Phoebe’s family lived. Joseph’s wife didn’t accompany him, so there were also many liaisons.”

I looked at him. “Then Phoebe could, indeed, be—”

“Dear God,” Sasha said softly. “Remember how she’d be drawing those charts when we were in junior high? Always looking for the illustrious ancestor? Poor Phoebe. She’d have been so thrilled to know.”

“Nothing to know,” our chauffeur reminded us. “Family legend could have created that story. You tell it enough generations, it becomes history. No way to prove anything. But there’s something else. The legislature passed a bill that allowed him—

a non-citizen—to buy land. He had about a thousand acres, and a mansion, Point Breeze, filled with the treasures of Europe—”

“Point Breeze!” I said. “Phoebe’s maiden name was Breeze.

DeBreeze. From Breeze?”

“Maybe. Doesn’t have to be. Somebody in her family could have decided to adopt the name. In any case, there was a huge fire—supposedly set by an angry Russian woman.”

“All those treasures lost,” I said. “Pity.” We were by now sit-233

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ting, idling in what would have been a great parking spot, down the street from Sasha’s place. Mackenzie finished his tale.

“That’s the interesting part. The story is that the good people of Bordentown came to the rescue. They carried the paintings and statues and whatnots to safety. And then, according to the story, they returned everything.”

“Really?” Sasha and I asked in unison.

“You’re cynics,” Mackenzie said with a shrug. “But I agree. I find the official story a little hard to believe. I mean we’ve got a man living like the king he was, with money he stole and smug-gled out, money basically taken from the common people of Italy and Spain. He’s a nice guy, but still, he represents the opposite of the democracy these people are building. His mansion is surrounded by ordinary, hard-working people. Small farmers, la-borers. And suddenly, the treasure house—treasures gotten by nothing this man did, but through his brother’s conquests that more or less stand for everything we weren’t supposed to stand for—is up for grabs.”

“So you’re saying—people grabbed.”

“Most people obviously didn’t. Their inventory seemed pretty complete when it was over. I’d think that nearly everybody returned whatever they took. But
everybody
? I don’t think human nature changes, no matter how prettily the history books word it.”

“So even if Phoebe wasn’t his descendant, she still might have had something that failed to be returned after the fire. Is that a polite way of putting it? One—or more—of her treasures might truly be just that. Ill-gotten or given to the pretty woman with whom he slept,” Sasha said.

“But who would know this story?” I asked. “Who on our list is a student of history and would know this?”

“There’s the rub,” Mackenzie said. “Go figure that out, you two. Once you do, we’re home free.”

Twenty

What do you think it could be, that treasure?” I asked as we opened the outer door to Sasha’s building.

“And shouldn’t that door be locked?”

“Could be treasures,” she said, then she looked at me quizzi-cally. “It never is, till after nine p.m.”

“I know, but shouldn’t it be, all the time?”

A car pulled away from the curb, and startled me.

“You’re getting twitchy and weird.” She closed the door behind her.

She was right, but that didn’t mean I could un-twitch. My mind felt clogged with potential dangers, as if Mackenzie’s information about Bonaparte had loosened items otherwise safely 235

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS

bolted down. Who now was a threat? Who knew enough to kill Phoebe and Toy?

“Why do you look like a deer in the headlights?” Sasha asked.

“Come on. I’ll make you decaf or tea. Or are you afraid Dennis is going to come back and rant again?”

“It’s not that.” Maybe it was. Too many questions about Dennis. But too many questions now about too many people.

Jesse Farmer. Not an “M,” but who knew what Phoebe might have meant by that letter? He’d been doing research for her. He’d know about the kind of valuables a Bonaparte might have owned. Maybe he was planning to rip Phoebe off.

“Not to worry,” Sasha said. “Dennis would be too scared to, now that his little scam has been foiled. But if he does show up, I am going to personally kill him for what he was trying to do to me. Come on. A flight of stairs never hurt anybody, and it’ll burn off one half a bite of sausage.” We started up.

Sasha’s condo was once part of a grand house, now sliced into three units, one on each floor. It makes for the kind of high-ceilinged spaciousness that is rare in newer buildings, but if you’re in a twitchy kind of mood, it’s also obvious that it was never designed to be a fortress, the way so many city apartment buildings are. There wasn’t any real lobby, only a narrow entry sliced off the original house’s more gracious one, with a staircase straight ahead, mail cubbies that were once open, but after some pilfering, were now covered with locked doors, and an elevator that hadn’t worked within recent memory.

“Phoebe always said her ‘treasures,’ plural,” Sasha said.

“Maybe there are lots of them. Then again, she would do things like pick up one of her pink crystal pyramids, or the plate with Charles and Diana painted on it when she said that, and I’m pretty sure those things never belonged to the Bonapartes.”

We went into Sasha’s condo, which, unlike the building itself, had a spacious entryway leading down a short hall to the living room.

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I closed the door but stopped mid-motion.

“What?” Sasha asked.

“Listen.”

She appeared to, then she shook her head. “What?”

“That horn. Did you hear it? Two honks, then a stop, then two honks.”

She pulled back in an exaggerated and stagy reaction. “Dear friend,” she said, “you are in deep trouble. Is it living with a crime-obsessed man that’s doing it? Was it seeing Toy dead? Or are you paranoid?”

“Didn’t you hear it?”

Before she spoke, she looked at me with an expression you never want to see on anybody’s face whose opinion you value. “If I heard a horn, so what?” she finally said quietly. “People honk night and day. It’s a rude city.”